Policing the Workplace and Rebuilding the State in “America's Finest City”: US Immigration Control in the San Diego, California–Mexico Borderlands

Abstract

In 2008, US immigration authorities raided the French Gourmet restaurant, bakery and catering business in San Diego, California. They arrested 18 employees for working in the United States without authorisation, and ultimately deported most of them. The raid reflects a growing effort by the federal government over time to compel employers to cooperate with state-led efforts to police workplaces and effectively cleanse them of unauthorised workers. This article traces the institutional genealogy of such efforts while demonstrating how they are part and parcel of a general “hardening” of US socio-territorial boundaries and the growth of a state apparatus charged with policing those boundaries. In doing so, the article seeks to illustrate how these developments articulate with the shifting nature of the state—in the contemporary United States and elsewhere—and how it defines and produces matters of security and wellbeing. It is a state that sits uneasily at the intersection of processes of neoliberalism, securitisation and the production of increasing precariousness for workers.